1 Domesday Tamworth: a Ghost Within the Book Æthelflæd 1100 Conference, 15 July 2018, Tamworth David Roffe in 1086 Tamworth
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Domesday Tamworth: a Ghost within the Book Æthelflæd 1100 Conference, 15 July 2018, Tamworth David Roffe In 1086 Tamworth was already a borough with a long history, as we have already heard this weekend. For reasons that are still not fully understood, it never became the administrative centre of a shire in the late tenth or early eleventh century like the neighbouring Stafford and Warwick. Nevertheless, characterized by burgess tenure and a degree of tenurial heterogeneity, it probably had something of a similar status. With such a profile we might well expect a detailed account of the borough in Domesday Book, but we do not find it. There is notice of burgesses of Tamworth in entries relating to the royal manors of Drayton Bassett and Wigginton in the Staffordshire folios and Coleshill in Warwickshire. Otherwise the borough is conspicuous by its absence. It was usual practice for boroughs to be enrolled in Great Domesday Book (GDB) at the beginning of the account of each shire. Whereas rural estates are listed by landholder with each assigned a separate chapter, boroughs were entered as communities, above the salt as it were. In escaping notice in this way, Tamworth is in good company. Most famously, both London and Winchester are absent, although a space was apparently left in the text for the insertion of each. As with Tamworth, burgesses belonging to rural manors in the vicinity are widely recorded, but the Domesday scribe never got round to inserting a composite account of each. The omissions have been widely lamented, but have been deemed readily understandable. It has been suggested that the society of the one was so complex that it defied economical summary, while the other was already adequately described in the earlier Winton Domesday. By contrast, a more prosaic reason has been put forward for the absence of Tamworth: the borough straddled the county boundary between Staffordshire and Warwickshire and it has been suggested that the commissioners of each assumed that the others had enrolled the town with the result that neither group did so. As much as we might credit the idea of bureaucratic incompetence, it is clear at the outset that this explanation is unsatisfactory. There are two basic objections. First, it is now known that both Staffordshire and Warwickshire were surveyed in the same circuit, conventionally known as number IV. Previous analyses have assigned Staffordshire to the West Midlands circuit, but the enrolment of some Staffordshire estates in the Warwickshire and Oxfordshire folios and Warwickshire estates in Staffordshire indicates that the two shires were surveyed together. They were therefore subject to the same group of commissioners. Second, those commissioners were not responsible for compiling the composite accounts of boroughs. Examination of documentation from the early stages of the inquiry shows that towns were surveyed by landholder just like rural estates. It wasn’t commissioners who compiled the composite account but the GDB scribe himself. The various sources that he brought together can often be identified in the text. The account of Wallingford in Berkshire, for example, is a rather uneasy amalgam of bits and pieces. The question, then, is why it was the Domesday scribe omitted Tamworth. The task was certainly not beyond him. Stamford was situated in no less than three counties, namely Lincolnshire, Northampton, and Roteland, but he nevertheless managed to cobble 1 together a coherent account which he entered in the Lincolnshire folios. I would suggest that he expected to do likewise here. The blank space at the head of the Staffordshire folios was probably intended for the enrolment of both parts of the borough. But the task eluded him. Needing to consult at least four sources for the two counties, he may simply that failed to get the information in time. Can we do better? Well, yes, we can! Or at least we can reconstruct something of the borough in the late eleventh century. The task is not as difficult as it might be. There has long been much regret over the inadequacies of the Domesday accounts of boroughs. Some are expansive, some are sketchy, none answer all the question we might want to ask. But we should acknowledge that the GDB scribe wrote with more purpose than is always allowed. He had a template, as it were. We see it most clearly in the account of Derby. First comes what is conventionally known as customary lands, that is the lands that owed dues and services to the king, and the value of the borough. There then follow in turn, non-customary fees, either urban liberties or lands that belonged to rural manors, and finally the customs and dues of the king and earl in the shire. Each category presents in a characteristic way in later records which are routinely used to interpret Domesday entries. Tamworth's later history, then, can tell us something of its eleventh-century forms. But it is the Domesday accounts of fees around Tamworth that provide a framework. So, our starting point is a less obvious characteristic of the Domesday account of the area. Polesworth, Dordon, Bramcote, Freaseley, Hall End, Pooley Hall, and Warton to the east of Tamworth are also missing from the text. In such circumstances one would normally assume that they were subsumed in other entries; Domesday place-names are often those of estates and so their entries might include a number of unnamed settlements. In this instance, however, later manorial histories indicate that this cannot have been the case: the settlements are undoubtedly omitted from the text. Given their proximity to Tamworth, the most obvious conclusion must be that they were part of the borough and omitted with it. This would by no means be unusual. Many boroughs took in a swathe of land in their vicinity. Derby, for example, extended into Little Chester, Quarndon, Little Eaton, and Litchurch, and York into Oswaldwick, Murton, Stockton, Sandburn, Heyworth, Gate Fulford, Clifton, Rawcliffe, Overton, Skelton, Mortun, and Wigginton. The territory of Tamworth is directly comparable. When we first have evidence for the Tamworth lands in the twelfth century they were constituted as demesne estates of the castle fee. It is almost certain, then, that they were held by Robert Dispenser in 1086. Their context is significant. Robert, the constable of the castle, had been granted lands in half a dozen counties, but it is those in the immediate vicinity of the borough in Warwickshire and Leicestershire that concern us today. Superficially the complex looks like a castlery, that is a block of land that was granted for the support of the fortress at the time of its construction sometime after the Conquest. However, on closer examination it was no such thing. First, Robert Dispenser’s title was derived from a right to the lands of a single pre-Conquest lord. Thus, Æthelmær is named as his only predecessor in all his Warwickshire estates. The record is incomplete for those in Leicestershire, but, apart from an Edwin Alfrith who is said to have held manors in Gartree wapentake, probably erroneously, Æthelmær is again the only name that otherwise occurs. Robert even succeeded to his loanlands, that is leaseholds, which he had held of Peterborough abbey 2 in Fillongley in Warwickshire with its members of Leire, Snarestone, and Odstone in Leicestershire. Domesday omits the claim, but Peterborough subsequently made good its right to all the lands as well as West Langton held TRE by Æthelmær which had also accrued to the castle fee by the twelfth century. An English identity for the fee is underlined by the location of the court of the honour. The fee did not meet in the castle itself, as one might expect of a castlery, but out in the sticks at Stipershill between Polesworth and Warton. On balance, I think that we can conclude that the castle fee was an essentially pre-Conquest complex and was held in its entirety by Æthelmær in 1066. This conclusion must suggest that Æthelmær had a pre- eminent role within Tamworth. Long ago, and in a different context, Ann Williams identified him as the brother of Æthelwine the sheriff of Warwickshire and uncle of Æthelwine’s successor Thorkil of Warwick. With such a background Æthelmær must surely be identified as the king’s reeve, or possibly even staller, in Tamworth and Robert as constable of the castle effectively stepped into his shoes. There were similar antecedents for castle fees at Lincoln, London, Nottingham, and Wallingford. Such parallels would suggest that as royal administrators of one kind or another both Æthelmær and Robert held their boroughs lands ex officio rather than in person. Stipershill, then, was in origin most likely a communal meeting place, probably the borough or perhaps even regional court. Wallingford again provides a parallel: there the motehall of the borough was located some two miles outside the defences. The king’s hall in Tamworth, by contrast, would have been located within or close to the borough. Popular histories have long asserted that the castle marks the site of a Mercian royal palace . There is an outside chance, however, that the first castle was built to the west of the borough centre where the Moat House now stand. The name 'Le mot' first occurs in the mid fourteenth century and may signify ‘motte’ rather than 'moat'. If so, then the present castle was most likely built in the early twelfth-century when Roger Marmion was granted the Dispenser fee. Similar changes of site at much the same time are evidenced at Berkeley, Canterbury, and Gloucester. The Moat House, then, too is a possible pre-Conquest royal centre, although its extramural position could suggest that it was entirely new.